by Bryan Smith
Then the walls seemed to fall away altogether, the tunnel opening up behind them like a pair of unfolding hands. Chad slid to his right, leaning into another slave as the truck went down a steep incline. Cindy held on to a strut. Chad leaned harder on the slave. The emaciated man groaned. The descent was so dramatic he could only compare it to a monster roller coaster going down a long, plummeting straightaway. His stomach roiled, and he felt a tickle of nausea in his throat.
Then the descent ended and they were on flat terrain again. Chad became aware of noise all around them. Strange sounds. Something like a carnival whistle. Angry shouts. Threats. The primal sound of conflict. Fists on flesh. A crack of a whip. Voices. A multitude of voices, like at a rock concert before the houselights go down. If he needed any further reminding that he was in a savage place, here it was, the sound of the devil’s playground in full bloom.
The truck slowed as it threaded its way through a milling crowd. Jeers were hurled at the truck. Chad’s heart thumped faster when he realized the epithets were directed not at the driver, a servant of The Master, but at the slaves in back. He turned to stare through the rear opening at the faces of the hecklers.
An old man with a long, tangled beard and a corona of stringy, dirty hair around a bald scalp walked behind the truck, leered in at them, and held his middle finger aloft. He wore a loincloth, and Chad saw a glint of silver at his throat.
Chad squinted, but he couldn’t make out what it was.
The man’s leering countenance receded as the truck pulled onto a rutted track along the cavern wall and picked up speed. A few minutes later they were pulling into an open space that served as a parking lot. The truck pulled to a stop alongside another transport vehicle, and its engine shuddered as it shut down. A door creaked open and there was a sound of booted feet slapping the hardpacked floor. Then a guard’s visor-obscured image appeared through the rear opening.
“Any nonslave personnel aboard?”
Cindy answered immediately.
“Yes.”
The guard scrutinized her. “You bear the mark of a slave. Are you emancipated?”
Cindy nodded. She held her chin high, proudly. “I am.”
“Step forward, please.”
Cindy got up, strode purposefully toward the rear of the truck, and jumped to the ground. She opened her pouch and produced her paperwork. The guard took the folded papers from her hand, opened them, and studied the words printed on them. The guard stared at the papers long enough to make Chad uncomfortable.
At last, though, the guard folded the papers and returned them to her. “I see you’re newly emancipated. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you have a slave on board?”
She nodded, pointed at Chad. “That one.”
“The fresh meat?”
“Yes.”
The guard motioned to Chad. “Step forward.”
Chad got to his feet and shuffled to the rear of the truck. He looked down at the ground, hesitating, wondering whether he was expected to jump with the leg irons still in place. He was still considering this when Cindy grabbed the chain linking the manacles around his hands and feet and yanked him out of the truck. He screamed, struck the ground at an awkward angle, and pitched forward. His open mouth tasted dirt, and he gagged. He groaned, rolled onto his side, and stared through blurry eyes at Cindy, who looked to be reaching out to help him.
Wrong.
Her foot, encased in one of his new Reeboks, drove hard into his stomach, punching the air out of him and sending an explosion of pain through his midsection. She kicked him again, harder, and he curled up, a pathetic attempt to deflect any further blows. She kicked him one more time anyway, the tip of the athletic shoe punishing the hands clasped protectively about his stomach.
Chad cursed her in his head, but he cried out for mercy. Something awful occurred to him. Wasn’t it possible Cindy was fucking with his head? She’d been down here a long time-long enough, perhaps, to have every remaining drop of humanity wrung out of her. Maybe she was a sadist and this was how she caught her kicks-by concocting a carefully wrought illusion of friendship and conspiracy, an illusion she was even now in the process of cruelly destroying.
He couldn’t see her, but he imagined a smirk creasing her lovely face.
The thrashing ceased with a jarring abruptness. Through his tears, he saw Cindy whirl away from him and face the guard.
The guard smirked. “Nice. You have to break them in right.” He cast a sidelong glance at Chad. “Some people just have a knack for this life. I think you’re one of ‘em.”
Cindy only said, “We’ll be going now.”
The guard nodded. “You’ll need to register with Slave Control. There’ll be some more paperwork.” He grinned. “And your letter.”
Cindy’s eyes gleamed. “The mark of emancipation.”
“Yep.” The guard lifted his visor. Chad saw that the man had a prominent brow and a bulbous nose. There was a hulking quality about him. “Will you be at The Gathering tomorrow?”
Shit, Chad thought, the thug’s hitting on her.
Cindy shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll see.”
The guard’s smile faded. “Yeah, sure.” He sneered. “Don’t go getting the big head, bitch. You may be emancipated, but I’m still a swingin’ dick with a big gun.”
Cindy sighed. “Jesus …”
Pitiless laughter trilled out of the guard’s mouth. “Just keep it in mind, whore.”
Cindy parted ways with the guard without another word, came to Chad, and pulled him to his feet by the chain. Chad staggered, his head swimming. A hand snapped across his face, stinging his flesh and clearing his vision.
“Be still,” Cindy hissed.
She knelt before him, extracted a key from her pouch, and unlocked his leg irons. She pulled them free and handed them to him. Then she stalked away from him, and he shuffled after her.
“Hey, hold up.” His breathing was labored. “Christ, this is heavy”
She didn’t say anything.
“Can’t I just drop it?”
She whirled around, and Chad drew up short. Her green eyes flashed with real anger. Seeing it made his knees shake. She twisted a handful of his shirt and pulled him to his tiptoes. Christ, she was strong. He’d forgotten how easily she’d handled him at the holding facility. His chest swelled with pain as panic jolted his heart with the force of a defibrillator. Her face, vibrant with newfound power, was inches from his own.
“You’re letting me down, Chad.”
A helpless sob escaped him. “I…”
“Shush.” Her lips brushed his ear. “Remember everything I told you. This isn’t real. I know it sounds crazy, but you have to let me hurt you to help you. No matter what I do, remember that I… shit…”
Chad wiped his eyes and studied her expression. “What, Cindy?”
Cindy averted his gaze, frowned at some middle-distance point. “Nothing.”
Chad was puzzled. She seemed almost… embarrassed.
But why?
She turned away from him, yanked on his chain. “Come along.” She talked to him over her shoulder. “And remember what’s real. Remember.”
Chad shuffled along after her. He still felt weary, battered, exhausted almost beyond the breaking point, but Cindy’s reassurances made things bearable. They soon passed through the parking lot’s security gate. The lot adjoined a squat, one-level building with the letters SCD crudely painted next to the entrance. Chad assumed, correctly, that this was the “Slave Control” building the guard had mentioned. Cindy shackled him to a rail outside the building and went inside. The rail was made of wood and stretched from one end of the building to the other. It made Chad think of the hitching posts cowboys tied their horses to in Western movies.
Chad glanced around, saw no one watching, and tossed the leg irons away.
Three other slaves were shackled to the rail. One was a black woman of Cindy’s approximate age. The slave closest to
him was a frail young man. Chad’s stomach clenched at the sight of him. He was dying. There was a wound of some sort along his side, a raw lip of swollen flesh. It pulsed with infection. He was feverish and glassy-eyed. He laughed, mumbled, and swatted at bugs that weren’t there.
Hallucinating, Chad realized.
The last slave was tethered at the far left end of the rail.
A small girl child.
Six, maybe seven years old.
Chad ground his teeth. A single word hissed through his clenched mouth: “Evil.”
The word captured the attention of the dying slave. For a moment, a moment Chad sensed would be all too fleeting, the man’s eyes were clear and focused. He looked right at Chad and said, “You’re new.”
Chad nodded. “I am.”
A sad smile touched the man’s face. “I’ve been here four months.” He frowned, and his eyes went momentarily dull before clearing again and locking on Chad. “Or maybe four years. I forget. Don’t have a lot in the way of advice to give you, friend. You’re pretty much fucked.”
Chad laughed. “I figured.”
“Just keep your head down.” The man nodded, affirming the truth of his own statement. “Whatever they do to you, don’t fight back.” He lifted an arm and gave Chad an unobstructed view of the wound that was killing him. “Ain’t worth it.”
Chad looked away. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“And you have to see Lazarus.”
Chad frowned. “Who?”
But that was the extent of the conversation. The doomed slave went back to swatting invisible bugs and mumbling half-coherent condemnations of God and, obscurely, Johnny Carson. Chad stopped listening to him and took in his surroundings.
So this was Below.
The place where The Master’s banished people were forced to live out what remained of their bleak existences.
Below was a huge cavern. The ceiling, high above him, was like an earthen sky. The place was lit by dozens of klieg lights. The rutted track that served as a road for the transport trucks was bordered on this side by the parking lot, the SCD building, and a scattering of other, vaguely official-looking buildings. Across the road was a row of more primitive-looking edifices. He heard a buzz of voices beyond those buildings.
The carnival whistle sound came again.
As did sounds of strange commerce and conflict.
There was a lot wrong with this place-a colossal understatement-but he realized it was a functioning community with a social order and, probably, some sort of rudimentary economy. It would fascinate a sociologist.
Chad, however, was repulsed.
Cindy emerged from the building thirty minutes later, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
The incongruous smile had a contagious quality that reminded him of…
Dream.
Chad blanched.
He’d been trying not to think about Dream. He hoped she was safe in a hotel somewhere, snuggling in for the night, blissfully unaware of his dire predicament. Logic told him this was probably the case. They had a car. They would be safe in the car.
He had to believe this.
Anything else was too dreadful to contemplate.
As Cindy drew nearer, he noticed a glint of silver at her throat. When she reached the hitching rail, Cindy turned her neck up, displaying a necklace to him. “You like?”
A piece of metal fashioned to resemble the fifth letter of the alphabet dangled from the necklace, glinting in the artificial daylight.
The dying slave was staring at Cindy, his gaze riveted to the necklace. Lucidity again touched his feverish visage. “Cunt. Emancipated cunt.”
Cindy hit him in the throat and he went down, folding faster than a glass-jawed stumblebum absorbing a blow from the heavyweight champion of the world. He lay unconscious on the ground, his arm dangling from the hitching rail.
Chad gaped at her. “My God …”
Cindy unlocked the chain shackling him to the rail. “Had to do it.” Her voice was low, barely audible. “I start accepting disrespect from slaves, we’re both in trouble.”
She led him across the rutted track. He stepped in a puddle of engine oil, winced, and shook oil from his sandal, then he joined Cindy on the sidewalk-like path of polished stones on the opposite side of the road.
He caught up to her and asked, “That guy back there, the sick slave, he said something about a guy named Lazarus.”
Cindy stopped abruptly. She put a hand on his chest, stilled his next question with a forefinger to the lips. “I’m taking you to Lazarus now.”
Chad frowned. “But who is he?”
Cindy’s answer only deepened the mystery. “I don’t know who he really is, Chad. I only know his real name is something else.”
She smiled. “Some people, Below’s more gullible denizens, think he’s God.”
God, Chad thought.
What a perfect irony.
He was in hell.
And God was here with him.
What might that mean?
And what was this strange, niggling feeling at the back of his mind?
He thought of a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces, the pieces slowly, slowly fitting together, revealing long hidden secrets, pointing the way…
Out of here, Chad thought.
And followed Cindy around a corner.
Eddie couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“You must be kidding. We can’t kill that thing.”
Giselle’s smile hinted of secrets unrevealed. “But we can.”
She was at her writing table again, still nude, gloriously nude, and he wanted her again. Oh, how he ached to be inside her again. Eddie forced his gaze away from her body. She too easily distracted him, and he did not want to be distracted now. What she was proposing was madness. He couldn’t do what she wanted. He just couldn’t. Couldn’t she see it was tantamount to suicide?
And Eddie wanted to live.
He hadn’t come this far, struggled this much, to voluntarily lay down his life. So tell her that, he thought. Be blunt. Lay your cards on the table. He paced the room, puffing intently on one of Giselle’s handrolled cigarettes.
“I don’t want to die!” he told her. He knew what it sounded like, but he didn’t care. “Call me a coward, go ahead. You won’t hurt my feelings. Goddamn, Giselle, you don’t survive Below without developing one bad motherfucker of a self-preservation instinct.”
He stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray on the table. He made himself look at her face, not the slopes of her breasts or the breath-quickening swell of her hips. No, better to seek sanctuary in the relative safety of her face. Her lovely, exquisite face. “I’m just a man, Giselle.” His voice was quiet, solemn, devoid of the previous agitation. “You send me up against that thing, you’ll be writing my death warrant.”
Giselle finished rolling a fresh cigarette. She licked the end of the paper, pressed it shut, and struck a match. She puffed the cigarette to life, exhaled, and said, “It’s true, Eddie, you may die. There is risk involved. Great risk.” Another slow exhalation of sweetly aromatic smoke. “That I can’t deny. But I can assure you of this-if you attempt to flee this place, you will certainly die.”
Eddie groaned. “Jesus, Giselle.”
Her gaze sharpened. “It’s true, Eddie. Remember what I told you about The Master’s mind? This place we inhabit, this shadow realm, is more than a corruption of reality. It’s a prison, Eddie. Once you enter The Master’s domain, you cannot leave. There is no exit. No early parole.” She smiled a little. “No escape.”
She opened her mouth. More smoke plumed away, perfect O’s floating up toward the ceiling. The smell was strange. Sweeter, more pleasant than tobacco. But it wasn’t marijuana. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know what they were smoking. It would be something freaky, wouldn’t it? Something like powdered bone or magical herbs. Essence of speech-impaired old man, perhaps.
Why not?
Look, h
e told himself. She’s a great lay. Strike that. A mundane term like “great lay” didn’t do this lady justice. She was light-years above and beyond anything he’d ever experienced, and he was a fairly experienced guy. He wasn’t King Stud, but he’d had his share of very nice sexual experiences, a great many of them certainly falling in the “great lay” category. And none of those women, not one, was fit to carry Giselle’s garters. She was ecstasy incarnate. Transcendence. Bliss. She could give you those things. Her body could take you to places beyond sensation, beyond orgasm, a place within the body, to the root of the pleasure centers deep in the muck of brain matter. And she could manipulate them with a precision a neurosurgeon would kill for.
Yes, she could do this.
He knew.
She had done it to him.
He was effectively enslaved to her now. There was no more need for ropes and discipline. He could never leave her, would never think of it, not now that he knew what she could do to him. He accepted this as fact and chose not to expend any energy struggling against it.
She owned him.
End of story.
But knowing that did not erase some very grim facts.
Giselle was a killer. A vicious killer.
And she was a sadist.
Bad things. He didn’t approve of any of the fucked-up shit she had done, let there be no mistake about that. Still, he’d surrendered his immortal soul to her. His immortal fucking soul, ladies and gentlemen, and you know what?
He’d do it all over again.
Without blinking a goddamn eye.
Which was why this act of resistance was so momentous a mental struggle. There was only one thing so awe-inspiring in its power that it rivaled the hold Giselle had over him, and that was The Master, a creature he’d bet the house on in a no-holds-barred death match against Satan and all his hellspawn.
